Review – “The Young Karl Marx”

I have long made grumblings of writing an article here, I just moved to a new house and started a new job so I decided to get to it while I still had some free time. The idea to do a review of this came when I was checking for nearby theaters on my movie pass app and the nearest theater happened to be an art house theater a couple of miles from my house. Living away from relatives we didn’t have any plans for Easter so my wife and I decided to check it out and leave our neighborhood of swap meets and men wearing bow ties selling bean pies in front of burger king to go see a movie in the local historic district where the locals continue the colonial tradition of brunch. The theater was a single screen theater with an old-style marquee with Karl Marx in big letters. The box office was staffed by a hipster male with a hairstyle typically reserved for male figure skaters and Final Fantasy characters. In order to buy popcorn and a soda I had to interrupt a conversation about Armie Hammer between a chubby woman wearing horn rimmed glasses and a skinny woman wearing horn rimmed glasses. The chubby woman took our order and despite appearing to work there I am still unsure what job the skinny woman could possibly have been doing. There were only about 6 other people at the movie mostly what appeared to be upper middle-class couples over 50.

The film started with a scene like the human hunting scene in Planet of the Apes. People dressed in rags and covered in mud search the ground for sticks and the they hear a noise; the French police arrive on horseback and begin rounding them up and beating them with sticks. The next scene is the introduction of Engels and his wife. His wife is leading an argument between the workers and her boss Engels father. She and her sister end up quitting and Engles then tracks them down looking for an interview with the proletariat of Manchester. He finds them in an Irish bar, he approaches them about getting an interview and he is punched. He takes one punch and he drops like a chloroformed child, when he wakes up he is being nursed by a beautiful red headed Irish woman who later becomes his wife. Marx introduction sets the pattern for much of his actions through out the film. He is at a meeting of a socialist organization where he sits around tables, eats, drinks, smokes, complains about not having money and insulting his allies berating them for not being radical enough. He is writing for a publication in Germany and they are all about to be arrested and they are having an argument of what to do next while the police are breaking down the doors, he ends up writing for a man named Arnold Ruge. The film then skips to Marx in his kitchen eating and talking with his wife about their future and her past. Marx’s wife is as ridiculously French as Engels wife is Irish and both are played by actresses’ way out of the actors league. His wife had given up a life of luxury as an heiress in order to be with Marx but she is in love and is a true believer. This scene also features the first of several mentions of Marx being one of (((them))). His wife is threatening to go back to visit her family and ask for money because they have a newborn daughter, she pressures him to instead hit up Ruge for money and to pressure Ruge to sell some of his railroad stock. The film then shows Marx and his wife attending a rally for a politician named Proudhon. Proudhon is giving a speech where he declares that property is theft. Marx decides to speak to him after this and in this meeting, he impresses Proudhon and begins his rivalry with several of Proudhon’s acolytes. The film also begins another reoccurring thing where legitimate criticisms of Marx and socialism/communism in general are brought up and breezed past never to be addressed again. Marx questions how if property is theft, how can there be theft without property, the film purposes that the flaw with Proudhon’s statement is it is all philosophical with no real world application and that there must be a way to implement this idea for it to be worth anything. The rest of the film is about Marx’s journey towards fulfilling that goal but in the moment they all just kind of laugh it off get complimented on their French and move on to the next scene.

In this scene, Marx is now visiting Ruge asking for money and makes reference to his railroad stock but he is unsuccessful, the meeting however is still fruitful it is there that he meets Engels.

The meeting with Engles starts of hostile, he claims not to know him but soon he begins to insult him for being rich and out of touch based on his writings and their previous meeting, things are not going well but then Ruge is called away and they are left alone in the room and the fellating of each other’s egos then begins. Moments after Ruge leaves the room right after Marx has given him a through dressing down Engles calls Marx a genius, Marx returns the compliment and says that his report on the workers of Manchester which he had just insulted was a colossal work addressing something no one else has touched. The film then cuts to them out side having left Ruge without a word. They are now smoking cigars, grinning ear to ear and walking with an extra spring in their step. The homo erotic tension is so palpable you could cut it with a hammer and sickle. They decide to author a book together but then their plans are interrupted by the French police asking people for their papers, which seem to have fallen out of Engles coat at some point. They make a run for it and the only chase scene of the film commences. There are several staples of the chase sequence, chickens, construction sites and people yelling at them as they walk through their homes. They escape and meet up at a bar where they drink and talk about the loves of their life Marx talks about how great his wife is and Engels who has yet to marry the Irish girl because he is still afraid of his father says, “it’s complicated”. He and Marx then make a toast and kiss. I swear I watched this movie, I’m not making this up. The next several scenes are about Engels meeting and befriending Marx’s wife, and the beginning of the writing collaboration between Marx and Engels. They start by writing a defense of Proudhon against a journal called the Critical Critique, their reply is initially called Critique of Critical Critique something the film things is so clever it is played for laughs several times. Not long after it’s publication the good times then come to an end and Marx and his wife are told they have 24 hours to leave France.

The film enters the low point of Marx’s life so far, he is in Brussels in exile from France where he was in exile from Germany. He has a second child on the way and he is now at the post office facing his dark night of the soul, his Jesus in the desert moment. He is at this post office in search of a job. He is quickly rejected from the position he applied for after promising to not engage in politics and providing an unsatisfactory handwriting sample. He then lowers himself even further and considers a non-white collar job offering to do anything. The film then cuts back to Marx’s house where his wife and her servant are being hassled by bill collectors only for Marx to walk in with a big grin on his face and an arm full of groceries and proceeds to pay the bill collectors from a full coin purse. He then tells him Engles had wired them some money and pulls out a lobster for dinner over which Marx, his wife and his servant discuss an offer that Engles has set up in England. Marx is hesitant to leave behind his currently unattended children but his true believer wife talks him into it and so he heads of alone to join the League of the Just.

When he gets to England it turns out that their membership in the league of the just is not a done deal and Marx secures it by claiming that he was close personal friends with Proudhon and he can connect their organizations which is a large over statement. He is at best a friend but more accurately an acquaintance of his at this point. They then travel to meet with Proudhon who isn’t interested in being the contact, he tells them that he is far too busy and lazy to take on the additional work but is interested in working something out. Proudhon then gives them a copy of his new book The Philosophy of Poverty a training montage the commences where they are furiously reading his book, writing notes in the margins and writing a response. Their response The Poverty of Philosophy again follows Marx’s favorite themes of not radical enough and we need a game plan not more musings, again turning on a former ally. Shortly after this at a meeting with some members of the Justice League Marx does a through critique and take down of Kietling who at this point has only been nice to them and is a charismatic and outgoing, workhorse and useful idiot. They are later called to an official meeting with the league and considering everything they have done are expecting to be expelled but instead they are given carte blanche to plan the new direction of the organization. Marx has apparently nurtured Kietling who they mention several times throughout the rest of the film has given up. They finally go to a big meeting for the Justice League and they take it over. Engels forces a vote naming him as the speaking delegate and then proceeds to make a speech calling for violent overthrow of the current system, he then proceeds to rename the organization the communist party and replace its banner, a white banner with a shinning sun and shaking hands with the slogan “all men are brothers”, with a deep red banner with the slogan “workers of the world unite”. After this coup they must be tired because they are next seen at a trip to the beach where Marx is complaining about being tired of all the hard work and never getting to write what he wants to write so they argue and decide to write what he has always wanted to write a plan for a new system the Communist Manifesto. While Engels and Marx discuss this their wives have a weird conversation about families Marx had 2 kids and Engels’ wife refuses to have kids with him unless he gives up his money but is chill with her 16-year-old younger sister giving him some kids. They then proceed to write the manifesto in another writing montage and the film ends with the four of them putting the finishing touches on the first draft while Marx’s servant brings them drinks. And the credits play out to a Bob Dylan song. I think it was The Times are a Changin’.

So far I haven’t talked much about Engels solo scenes. The reason is I can not place them on a timeline they are all the same. Engels has major daddy issues and his two central struggles in the film are seeking his factory owning papa’s approval while still hanging out with his cool commie friends. The other issue is he struggles with the fact that he is wealthy and a successful part of his father’s company. Engels in the film somehow makes an overweight man who between mouthfuls of food and drink, and puffs on a cigar talks about communism and complains about being unable to feed his family by not having a job the more likable character. Engels is also played by easily the worst actor of the film, for the most part the actors range between serviceable and good but Engels whenever tasks with anything in the nonverbal realm breaks out into faces that express a wide variety of ailments. The production value is surprisingly good, the film is well lit and the locations and costumes all are convincing. Where the film really falls apart in the editing and the script. The dialogue to their credit is cringe worthy not because it is unbelievable or unnatural but because it sounds like the things awful pretentious people would say. The overall structure and tone of the film is that of a Wikipedia article, its choppy and is the opposite of the old adage “show don’t tell”. My wife and I discussed politics afterwards and it didn’t go well, so unless you are politically aligned and looking for a hatewatch I would not recommend this for a date night.

This could be a potentially wonderful hatewatch for Mr. Riven and I. We have two lists of date night movies, 1) well-reviewed spooky movies, or 2) hilariously bad movies meant to be watched after the third (ish) drink of the night.

The world would be a significantly better place if Marx had never been born. I’d be hard pressed to think of a specific individual whose ideas have caused as much misery, suffering and destruction as his.

Higher estimates put Khan’s army at killing 40 million people, or about 10% of the estimated goal population at the time. Communism has a higher body count, but Khan probably has the edge in terms of proportionality. Alexander was a piker in comparison. Quantifying the death tolls of Christianity and Islam are a bit harder. For example, while the crusades were justified by religion, they also had significant political justifications as well that used religion as a cover. I’m certain there were plenty of true believers fighting for their faith amongst the armies on both sides, but many were not. I don’t have any good way of breaking those casualties down based on the motivating ideologies of the killer.

Alexander the Great was a relatively benign conqueror. Sure, he occasionally let his men loose to rape and pillage to blow off steam, but that was the standard of the day. Most of the time he left things as he found them, just with assholes answering to him. Everyone was equal…beneath him.

20%, if you include Lilith in your calculations. There’s also the issue of the following:

And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. (Genesis 4:17)

So there would have to be some other woman, bringing Cain’s proportion to roughly 16%. The bible’s also a tad unclear on the total number of Adam and Eve’s offspring. Presumably they had at least two daughters, one for Cain and one for Seth, though it never gets specific. While Seth was born after the murder of Able, we don’t know the order of the other children or their number. It is very possible that even with a literal interpretation of genesis as historical fact, that Khan could have him bested on proportionality.

Jesus? I’m pretty hardcore agnostic, but seriously what did Jesus advocate that has anything to do with mass killings? I’d even give you a pass if you had said Martin Luther, and blamed him for the 30 years war, but not sure you can hang that on Jesus.

Why, it’s almost as if they have to go after trivial, uncontroversial, red meat issues to distract from their complete disinterest in dealing with actual crises (entitlement reform, debt, foreign wars, immigration, etc.)!

The film then cuts back to Marx’s house where his wife and her servant are being hassled by bill collectors only for Marx to walk in with a big grin on his face and an arm full of groceries and proceeds to pay the bill collectors from a full coin purse. He then tells him Engles had wired them some money and pulls out a lobster for dinner over which Marx, his wife and his servant discuss an offer that Engles has set up in England.

Every socialist’s wet dream is to have a big hunky rich man who will give them money for doing nothing.

My kid and I watched Ready Player One last week in the theater and I realized that I hate fucking watching movies in theaters.

I can’t sit through an entire movie. I get bored and if I can’t pause the movie, I am fucked. I also miss watching movies in Memphis where talking during a movie isn’t viewed with scorn and horror like it is in Minnesoda. I have been to movies in Memphis where the crowd yelling shit (at the movie and each other) was far funnier than anything on the screen.

The only thing I liked (and the movie wasn’t bad) was the popcorn. I like movie popcorn.

My youngest son is a talker. When he was small, he and I always got in trouble because he would keep up a non-stop commentary on Shrek and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. But there were sure a lot of parents around us who thought we should have sat in the dark absolutely quiet and still.

My kid wanted to watch it because he read the book over spring break. It was one of the first times he had watched a movie based on a book he had read. Was funny watching his reaction to how movies mangle books.

And yes, we did talk during the movie about how different the keys were than the book (for all you uptight h8ers). But we did it quietly and there weren’t many people in the theater.

Greetings from Memphis. On every topic here, there are two sorts of people:
a) folk who wear tee shirts and jeans and yell their every thought on the golf course or the rest of us
b) folk who need to characterize everything in terms of race or the rest of us
c) folk who bitch about everything in town but who won’t stay in their little suburb or the rest of us
d) folk who think FedEx is forever and is everything or the rest of us
e) folk who think Corky’s and the Rendezvous are excellent or the rest of us
f) folk who put sugar in their whiskey and tea or the rest of us
g) folk who have never met a useful Ole Miss alum out in the real world in a gainful situation or….oops: there is no tails on this particular coin….so there is ONE thing on which we all can agree.

Here’s to straw hats, suede shoes, and exit visas for anyone I can hear in a theater or on the golf course.

The only thing I liked (and the movie wasn’t bad) was the popcorn. I like movie popcorn.

And the thing that finally drove me completely OUT of the movie theater is listening to assholes chomping their popcorn with their goddam mouths open. I’m in a homicidal state before the previews are even done.

Not to say that you personally did that but given your position on talking during the movies, I ain’t ruling it out either.

So, this was the crime so heinous, so egregious, that the attorney-client privilege simply had to be violated:

The F.B.I. agents who raided the office of President Trump’s personal lawyer on Monday were looking for records about payments to two women who claim they had affairs with Mr. Trump, and information related to the publisher of The National Enquirer’s role in silencing one of the women, several people briefed on the investigation said.

The search warrant carried out by the public corruption unit of the Manhattan federal attorney’s office seeks information about Karen McDougal, an ex-Playboy model who claims she carried on a nearly yearlong affair with Mr. Trump shortly after the birth of his son in 2006. Ms. McDougal was paid $150,000 by American Media Inc., the Enquirer’s parent company, whose chief executive is a friend of Mr. Trump’s.

This is a crime because why, again? I read Ken White’s piece at TOS and he was very insistent that there really had to be something truly big at the bottom of this because of all the people who would have to sign off on it, and how it couldn’t be just some conjured-up bullshit. OK, I respect the hell out of Ken and I know he knows plenty about being a federal prosecutor, so I take him at face value. And then…..this is it?

I’m still waiting for somebody to tell me what federal crime was being investigated. Never mind how it ties back to Russian interference in the election, what crime do they think was committed when hookers get paid to keep their yaps shut by anybody, for any reason?

Exactly. Paying someone hush money is only a crime if the payee is extorting it. If it’s offered by the payer simply to keep someone quiet, I’m no law-talkin’ guy but I’m unaware of any law outlawing such a thing.

Every single settlement agreement in the history of ever has a confidentiality clause that prevents the plaintiff from talking about the agreement, other than to acknowledge it exists. If the rule is that you can’t pay for silence, every settlement agreement breaks that rule.

As do the vast numbers of employment agreements and other agreements that have confidentiality clauses.

If it’s hookers that are being paid, then maybe they are going after Trump for the crime of paying for sex. Pretty thin gruel, if you ask me. It would be pretty funny to have Trump be our first registered sex offender president if he’s on the hook for a prostitution charge.

I have heard that the crime was bank fraud. Supposedly the lawyer took out a loan to make the payment using his house as collateral, and there is speculation that he told the bank he needed to loan to add a new room to his house. When he used it for something else, it became criminal or something. Has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with the whole made up Russia narrative, but then again, this is not about any actual crime other than Trump daring to win an election that the dnc crime syndicate thought it had already rigged for Hillary.

Like I said.. this is what the rumors say happened considering the indictment is coming from the same state as the bank the loan was taken from. Me I think this is bullshit intimidation by the people that just want to prevent us from focusing on the real criminal activity of the Obama admin they were all part of, and have no doubt Mueller was part of that cabal.

Supposedly the lawyer took out a loan to make the payment using his house as collateral, and there is speculation that he told the bank he needed to loan to add a new room to his house.

Assuming he paid the loan back, would that even be fraud?

Even if the bank loaned him the money based on the value of his house after the room was added (which I don’t think is the way HELOCs work – I think they go off the current value of your house), I’m not seeing any damages to the bank at all here. And, again, even if it was fraud, was it criminal or civil?

It’s about breaking the lawyer and making him roll on Trump. Keep in mind that the agenda here is to replace Trump with someone that will not go after the Obama administration (a crime syndicate if anything ever was according to what we now know) and the Clinton crime syndicate that thought they had a rigged election that would allow her to replace the Obama one with her own.

The only thing that I can think of that would be illegal is of the women were paid out of his campaign funds. If that’s the case, I don’t think that’s felony level stuff. I *think* that in the past when politicians have been found to do things like this they just end up having to pay the money back.

There are oh so many reason not to donate to the ACLU. My primary reason is that they’ve reversed positions on freedom of assembly (at least when it concerns pro-life demonstrators), freedom of speech (if the protesters are armed), and religious liberty (which, like Gary Johnson, they dropped as soon as the Leftist decided such rights were ‘gross’). They’re just a left-wing advocacy group now

And, in any case, it’s patently absurd that this trifling matter called for a blatant violation of the attorney-client privilege.

I agree. But, if you notice, very few people are up in arms. Hell, a wide swath of the public is downright gleeful about this.

At this point, I find myself growing skeptical of the future of republican government and individual liberty in the United States. You have executives in the tech sector openly pining for one party rule. You have young people openly hostile to the concept of freedom of speech or freedom of religion. You have much of the public that sees due process as, at best, an inconvenience. I don’t see how republics survive in that environment. Maybe the best that one can hope for is that the eventual Caesar is one willing to give the totalitarians a taste of what they’ve been asking for before turning on the rest of us.

I keep seeing chin-strokers in the media saying “Boy, they better have been after something really serious or there will be hell to pay.”

And my thought is “No, I don’t there will.” Even if it turns out that the application was paper-thin, the judge was a big-time Hillary supporter with a record of saying Trump should be impeached, and they didn’t find shit on Trump or his campaign, I think the blowback will be pretty much zero.

The only person who might take action on this is Trump, and I think this is mostly a trap to try and provoke him to do something.

We’re fucked. Its banana republic time. This is the Deep State letting everyone know that they can do anything they want to anybody, even the President’s personal attorney, and there’s not a goddam thing anyone can do about it, elections be damned.

The blowback will come from Trump supporters in whose eyes the legitimacy of the federal government will be practically nil. The authority of governments that are not explicitly and blatantly authoritarian rests entirely on the average guy on the street acceding to its legitimacy. What happens when a large chunk of the American public actively rejects that authority as illegitimate? Not passively, in the sense of grumbling “bah, the government is all crooks”, but actively believing that the authority of the government is illegitimate and citizens are thus not bound to comply with it.

It just gives them an excuse to fill up the prisons even more. We spend a lot of time talking about GULAGs and such on here, but has it occurred to anyone that we already have GULAGs? The US already imprisons more people per capita than any other country; and for increasingly ridiculous reasons. The way I see it, we just need to explicitly start imprisoning people for wrongthink and we’re right there with Soviet Russia. It’ll be more sanitized for the outside world than filling burn pits with thousands of bodies but the same will have the same effect. What’s the difference between executing someone for a political crime or locking them up for life for the same thing?

R C Dean
on April 10, 2018 at 1:44 pm

The blowback will come from Trump supporters in whose eyes the legitimacy of the federal government will be practically nil.

Sorry, Chip, just not seeing it. I really don’t see mass demonstrations by Trump supporters over this. I don’t see them taking any real action at all, in fact, because of this. I think it will be more grumbling, maybe a futile effort to work within the system with contributions and votes, and that’s it.

The stakes just keep getting raised. The unknown in this is whether the DOJ IG and the Utah prosecutor are going to break cover with indictments of the conspirators in the DOJ and FBI. I don’t see anything else that might set the Deep State back, even an inch.

So, again, this is just fluffy, manufactured bullshit. And for this penny-ante bullshit, one of the sacred principles of our legal system was casually thrown in the trash…..but it’s OK because ZOMG, Drumpf y’all!!!1!

(1) Russian collusion with the Trump campaign
(2) Anything else he runs across while investigating (1)
(3) Obstruction of his investigation into (1) and (2)

Leaving aside the question of whether (1) is sufficiently specific to be valid (hint: probably not), (2) is clearly invalid under the regs for special counsel. (3) is pretty anodyne, as long as the main charter is fine.

Mueller could have kept this under his charter as written. My speculation as to why he didn’t is above.

That’s being generous. What the hell does “collusion” mean in the context of what is being said? Do they mean that Russians hacked into Diebold machines and changed people’s votes? Or do they mean that a few programmers got money from the Russian government to set up Facebook bots?

As far as point 2, it’s insane. So Mueller wakes up in the middle of the night hears some crackpot mention on Coast to Coast AM that Trump’s Russian contacts were involved with the JFK assassination. Does that mean he can start investigating the grassy knoll.

This so transparent a partisan hit job/witch hunt that it would be funny if it weren’t so depressing and dangerous.

The actual language is “Any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump”.

Just to start with most obviously overbroad part of this “links . . . between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign” contains two hopelessly broad and thus impermissibly vague terms – “links” and “associated”. If the caterer for a Trump campaign event had also catered an event for the Russian embassy 10 years ago, I think Mueller would be chartered to investigate that, even though there is no conceivable connection to any federal crime whatsoever.

“Coordination” – what the hell does that mean? If the Trump campaign wanted to set up a totally legal phone call with the Russian government to discuss, say, the official Russian position on, well, anything, I don’t see anything illegal there, but there is certainly “coordination” with the Russian government – you try setting up an international teleconference without coordinating with the other side.

The payments likely violated campaign finance laws. Whether or not such laws should exist (which they shouldn’t), it is the law and the law should be enforced equally (I know that that is never true, as we’ve seen with the Clinton case).

But, this was all about Russia fever dreams, remember. We are going to end up with a report about campaign finance law violations by the Trump campaign and all our betters are going to pretend like this was never about Russia fever dreams.

There are a lot of “ifs” left out there. I don’t have faith, though, that Trump wouldn’t have done something like what is being alleged. Again, though, this has transformed from an investigation about “Russian collusion” to an investigation of “Trump”. If a federal prosecutor is allowed to just investigate any individual, without any limits and no specific crime being shown to have been committed then they are going to find something to bust you on. A federal prosecutor could nail anyone with that kind of mandate.

My prediction: Mueller finds that Trump violated campaign finance laws and was involved in a cover-up to hide this fact. The media focuses on this and ignores the fact that not an iota of evidence has been found to corroborate the original assertion of Russia collusion. Democrats retake the House and begin articles of impeachment. Half of the country has a sour taste in their mouth about an endless effort by rich white liberals to invalidate the results of the 2016 election. Bad things follow.

If people think the Trump is the worst of the backlash, they are sadly mistaken.

The nut of it seems to be that paying off Daniels during a campaign could have potentially been an in-kind campaign contribution.

Of course, this wasn’t a contribution to the campaign proper, or to support any kind of activity or expenditure by the campaign proper. We need to cast a wider net to say that paying off someone to keep their mouth shut during a campaign is a campaign contribution.

To the law, then! Which turns out to be utterly unhelpful:

the provision of any goods
or services without charge or at a
charge that is less than the usual and
normal charge for such goods or services
is a contribution. Examples of
such goods or services include, but are
not limited to: Securities, facilities,
equipment, supplies, personnel, advertising
services, membership lists, and
mailing lists.

What we have here is an expenditure which does not easily fit within the language of the regulations. Let’s say the Trump campaign knew about the expenditure, and knew it would benefit the campaign. Does everything that anyone does that a campaign knows about and would benefit the campaign become an in-kind contribution? Really? So the Clinton campaign got in-kind contributions (which they did not report) when they were given debate and interview questions in advance? If a restaurant stays open late so that a candidate running behind can grab a bite, is that an in-kind contribution?

I’m struggling with a definition of in-kind contribution that catches this payoff which isn’t absurdly broad.

I keep going back to the fact that the DOJ under Obama refused on multiple occasions to even investigate the Clinton Foundation. They literally refused to even open one and snuffed out any attempt at the FBI to get the ball rolling.

What is Mueller looking for? Well, beyond the Stormy payments, they are also leaking crap about Trump getting paid for a speech by a “pro-Putin” Ukrainian. A Ukrainian who also happened to have paid Bill Clinton for speeches, and who donated $13 million to the Clinton Foundation over the years (compared to $150k to Trump for the speech). They have no evidence of quid pro quo. No evidence it was a campaign donation of any kind. But the speech was only 20 minutes and Mueller’s team thinks that fishy.

Newsflash – it is. But the notion that there weren’t a litany of far more grievous crimes that Clinton’s could have been charged with is ludicrous. And we haven’t even gotten to how this entire investigation takes the opposite approach of the email investigation. Mueller’s team is bringing up trumped up charges left and right to turn people whereas Comey and the DOJ gave out immunity deals like candy to Clinton people.

I wonder how they see the ending of this playing out. Do they think Trump supporters/voters are just going to shrug their shoulders at the obvious double standards because the powers that be tell them to?

This has been a media investigation from the beginning. They never applied pressure on the Obama administration to ever investigate anything that would harm them (even after the administration threw a guy in jail over a video, rather than admitting that a terrorist attack had occurred in Libya). On the contrary, the media provided the Obama administration with excuses

What is Mueller looking for? Well, beyond the Stormy payments, they are also leaking crap about Trump getting paid for a speech by a “pro-Putin” Ukrainian.

Not a Russian? Huh.

Comey and the DOJ gave out immunity deals like candy to Clinton people.

Another massive scandal that is utterly overlooked. Typically, you don’t get an immunity deal unless you cough up info that is material to an indictment. The immunity deals were shams, and thus part of a coverup of absolutely astonishing scope. I wonder if they could be overturned.

Certainly you don’t mean to suggest that preemptively immunizing witnesses isn’t in the best interest of the investigation. Next you’ll suggest they were more concerned with what might come out than what they’d miss.

From my understanding, Marx’s wife was of Prussian or some Germanic minor aristocratic family. She was Marx’s neighbor, as Marx’s father was a successful and well to do attorney.

Also, it’s an utter disgrace that there is a film about Marx’s life rather than one about Bukunin, whose attacks on Marx’s ‘scientific socialism’ is brutal in “God and the State” (the only published work by Bukunin as he was a professional revolutionary- of course of Russian aristocratic blood).

She was Marx’s neighbor, as Marx’s father was a successful and well to do attorney.

That’s the thing I’ve noticed about communist revolutionaries. They just about never come from the laboring classes they claim to champion. They’re just about always from the class one or two removed from the top. The working classes are nothing more to the communist than useful cannon fodder to be used in their quest for power.

Thaddeus Russel interviewed Moshe Kasher for his podcast late last year. They’d both grown up in the Bay area and talked at length about trying to embrace the “authenticity” they felt they lacked in their home lives… by hiding anything remotely bourgeois about their white middle-class upbringings and attempting to imitate downtrodden black youth.

Thankfully, no. I like being alive and plan to stay that way for a long time.

AlexinCT
on April 10, 2018 at 1:23 pm

“That’s the thing I’ve noticed about communist revolutionaries. They just about never come from the laboring classes they claim to champion. ”

That’s because their revolutionary fervor isn’t about helping the masses at all, but using those fools to overthrow the current centers of power they never would have access to because they are morons, so they can take power to themselves. That’s communism in a nutshell, but don’t let the fact that it is a bunch of profiteers banking on the basest of human emotions – envy and jealousy – to garner support for the overthrow of the ruling class, and replacing them with themselves, get in the way of the fables about it being about the plebes.

And we haven’t even gotten to how this entire investigation takes the opposite approach of the email investigation. Mueller’s team is bringing up trumped up charges left and right to turn people whereas Comey and the DOJ gave out immunity deals like candy to Clinton people.

I used to roll my eyes at the people predicting civil insurrection, but I’m not so sure that it won’t happen anymore.

If the traditional First Amendment avenues (petition for redress of grievances) continue to be blocked off, and the electoral process continues to be corrupted (and no, I am not referring to teh Roooskeez), I think there may emerge a real danger of insurrection.

It is what they think they want. I doubt most of them even have the vocabulary or concepts to start thinking about what a 4GW insurrection would look like here in the US where you have armed, experienced cadres who could quickly join up with inexperienced but armed and willing insurgents. Look at how the DC snipers (remember those two clowns?) tied up Law Enforcement for weeks. Or the Dorner (sp?) guy in California. Now imagine if even .1% of the population decides it’s night of the long knives time. It would be ugly, ugly, ugly, and I don’t think either side would like the end results. Even if you had some idealists who were dedicated to liberty trying to keep things relatively calm, they aren’t likely to be the group that comes out on top. Arab spring comes to mind.

Liberty would be the ultimate loser in ANY civil conflict in this country. There is no violation of rights too egregious during a war. Just look at Ex parte Merryman – the Supreme Court said that Lincoln had no right to suspend habeas corpus, and Lincoln basically laughed in their faces and did whatever the hell he wanted. Why? Well, dammit, there was a war to win!

Exactly. The American Revolution is pretty special in that it was an armed rebellion that was effectively a civil war where the end result was a net benefit to liberty. And even then, during the war, I imagine there were all sorts of anti-liberty things going on. I’m not a good enough of a historian to know for sure what sorts of atrocities happened. But the Civil War part 1 certainly doesn’t bode well for a redux.